Pretend conversations early on lead to better vocabularies later.

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Confronted with a baby—or puppy—most adults can’t stop themselves from dissolving into baby talk: “WHO’S the cutest? It’s YOU! YES it IS!” We slow down, increase our pitch by nearly an octave, and milk each vowel for all it’s worth. And even if the baby can’t speak yet, we mimic the turn-taking of a conversation.

This “parentese” is found across cultures, and babies exposed to more of it at home seem to do better at acquiring their home language. But it’s not all about instinct: a paper published in PNAS this week suggests that parents can be trained to improve their parentese and that this training gives their babies’ language a boost.

Learning to baby talk

Why does more parentese go hand in hand with language acquisition? It’s an open question. Recordings from parents and children in their homes show a correlation—the more parentese there is, the more likely the babies are to be a little more advanced with their language abilities. But is the parentese itself actually helping? And if so, how? Or is there another factor at play that boosts them both?

There’s some reason to think the parentese itself is actively helpful. Its simple, exaggerated language could make it easier for babies to grasp what’s being said. But it could also be that its melodic, theatrical qualities grab and hold babies’ attention, while also giving them space to practice conversation by babbling during their “turns.”

A group of researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle wanted to see whether parents could be coached on improving their parentese and whether this would affect their babies’ language development. So they tracked 71 families with young babies over the course of a year, asking the parents to record a full weekend of the family’s conversations when the babies were 6, 10, 14, and 18 months old.

They split the families into two groups, offering coaching to one group but not to the other. The control group still did all the recordings, but the coached group came in to the lab after the researchers had listened to each set of recordings and got personal feedback and pointers.

The coaching helped the parents to identify helpful habits in their own speech, like engaging in back-and-forth interactions with their babies. They were also given suggestions about what kinds of age-appropriate interactions they could have during activities like bathtime or meals.

First steps

The results were promising: parents in the coaching group showed more use of parentese over time compared to the control group and also engaged in more back-and-forth interactions with their babies. The babies themselves vocalized more, too—if you remove non-linguistic noises like coughing and count prelinguistic noises like babbling, the babies in the coaching group were chattier.

And at the end of the study, babies in the coaching group did better on language assessments than babies in the control group.

The researchers checked that factors like the parents’ level of education weren’t affecting the outcomes. They made sure that this was balanced across the two groups at the start of the experiment and had a look to see whether it was correlated with the children’s outcomes at the end. It wasn’t—babies from across the social class spectrum all seemed to get a boost when their parents received coaching.

But as promising as this research is, it’s just a start, and it does have some important weaknesses. For one thing, the control group didn’t have any intervention at all, while the coached group knew that researchers would be listening closely to their behavior to give them personal feedback. While it’s difficult to keep up an act for a whole weekend, it’s still possible this knowledge could have affected their behavior on the recordings.

And studying babies is messy, difficult, and time-consuming, with a really high drop-out rate among the participants. This, plus limited resources, usually means small samples, and this study is no exception. That doesn’t invalidate the results, but it does mean the data will be noisy, which could mean that the results are exaggerated. So more studies will be needed to confirm these results and understand them better.

Early language ability is linked to advantages later in life, but it’s a messy link that has a lot of different possible explanations. So one crucial question for future research to answer is whether these benefits persist later into the children’s lives—even after the coaching stops.

This is the kind of research that while not very flashy can pay humongous dividends in the real world. If something this simple could improve an infants language abilities by even a fairly small percentage reliably, it could have massive consequences for the lives of those infants. They could end up socializing better when they meet other children, doing better and having higher self-esteem in school, and language skills can have knock-on effects on every other aspect of your life. Those would be life changing for many children.

I guess my wife and I are the weird ones. We never baby talked to our daughters (I don't think I've ever baby talked to any kid). They are both now in high school and are honor roll or distinguished honor roll students every semester. They also have great vocabularies. I think the real key is that we read to them every night until they were at least 8 years old. Sadly, most parents don't read to their kids anymore.

I mean this sounds wierd. Could it also be that one set of parents(those who were getting feedback), just wound up talking to their children more?

Our level of 'Parentese' was very small. We talked to both our children for the most part as if they were 'Adults'.

And both our children speak very well, and except for one of our kids medical issues, they both do fine interacting with both adults and other children.

Or maybe im confusing 'Parentese' with baby talk?

Same or similar here. We never did baby talk with any of our kids, only using our adult voices. But we did teach them some sign language for things like poop, pee, more, food, diaper, etc... All three were fairly language-advanced throughout their time in daycare and continue to be at ages 5, 8 and 16.

Of course, there are probably other variables at work. Kids are sponges. Probably explains why even my 5 year old loves herself some Nine Inch Nails.

Works with cats too. I talk with our cat often and she responds. We have a rough idea what the other is trying to say. "The dog needs out." "The dog needs in." "The dog gets to go outside. Why can't I?" (She is very concerned about welfare of the dog) "If we go outside you will have to hold me since it is snowy out." "It's time for kitty treats!" "Really, I was serious about treat time." "Lets play!" "No, I don't know where the toy is. Just because I had it last..." "FOOD! The food dish is 3/4 empty. I think I will starve soon." etc.

The rest of the family hardly talk to her and wonder why she rarely talks with them.

One of the very few things I've retained from my minor in Psychology was that babies are born with a blank slate on being able to tune in on language/accent related sounds. Each language has unique sets of syllables and sounds that don't exist in other languages. And while a younger baby can detect the differences in all the sounds, as they age, and are expose to just the languages spoken around them, they lose the ability to tell those differences.

I still remember watching the videos of babies sitting next to a toy monkey that would light up and make noise when the sound of a syllable being repeated would change. The babies would begin to anticipate the monkey making noise when the syllable would change, and turn to watch it when they detected a change in the sound. Younger babies would turn at ANY change in syllables, while older babies would only turn when there was a change that is apparent in their "native" language. One of the few things we forget rather than learn as we age, probably for efficiency reasons.

I'm guessing this study is related to that. Even if it's just babble-talk, I have to assume the parents are still using the syllables that are the basis of their language. So the fact that they're bombarding their children with these syllables helps those babies learn (or un-learn, really) which ones to remember. Which then gets their language foundation set up much faster. First syllables, then words, then sentences. And then forget them all, and use acronyms.

Sure, we occasionally talked that way to our child, but mostly, we had real conversations and tried to answer every question to our abilities.

Such as how an explosion works or what makes up an atom or detailed explanation of the solar eclipse (which I got said child out of school so they could watch it). We've always just focused on excessive and detailed information with our child. Even when they were two, we always strove to give detailed verbal answers.

And now, the child is in trouble for acting as a know-it-all who won't stop talking in school.

I talked to my kids and read them books every day when they were babies. My son had the "privilege" of sitting on my chest for hours at a time daily for about a month after he was born due to my recovering from back surgery. I would just talk and play lightly with him for that time as I couldn't move him (no twisting or lifting, I had to wait for someone to come get him off my chest if I needed to get up). At 2 months he was saying his first word: mom. He and my daughter are both in language immersion school learning Mandarin and English without issue. I need to get back to reading with them every night as I've been a bit slack at it lately.

As far as I understood the results. Parents trained in it, babbled more to their babies and the babies latter learned language better. But there wasn't a group instructed to talk to their babies more without using baby talk.

I guess my wife and I are the weird ones. We never baby talked to our daughters (I don't think I've ever baby talked to any kid). They are both now in high school and are honor roll or distinguished honor roll students every semester. They also have great vocabularies. I think the real key is that we read to them every night until they were at least 8 years old. Sadly, most parents don't read to their kids anymore.

You're a two parent household, and I'm going to assume (based on the demographics of this site and your use of language) you and your spouse is educated and thus have had relative stable work. There is a lot of built in advantages there, foremost is stability. Stability creates a lot of positive feedback loops. Unstable households are non-stop distractions and worry for children. You don't learn when you're hungry, or fearful the cops are coming for dad again because he's been drinking because he's been out of work.

Not that reading to your kids doesn't help. The point is that if we're trying to maximize our children's potential, the low-hanging fruit are not related to reading books. It's about minimizing the effects of poverty and not passing our sins onwards.

This is the kind of research that while not very flashy can pay humongous dividends in the real world. If something this simple could improve an infants language abilities by even a fairly small percentage reliably, it could have massive consequences for the lives of those infants. They could end up socializing better when they meet other children, doing better and having higher self-esteem in school, and language skills can have knock-on effects on every other aspect of your life. Those would be life changing for many children.

I think we’re seeing another effect given the dropout rates and the type of intentional focus given the parents and subsequently the babies: deliberate practice.

As far as I understood the results. Parents trained in it, babbled more to their babies and the babies latter learned language better. But there wasn't a group instructed to talk to their babies more without using baby talk.

My experience is that our daughter had delayed language; but we chose baby sign language instead of babbling so she didn’t suffer from delayed vocabulary nor language acquisition. She probably didn’t get any vocalization practice her first year.

Our son was the opposite. He resisted learning or using baby sign, but since our daughter was vocal by then he had plenty of observations of real baby talking. He was using full sentences by 12 months at the same time she was. It helped he was determined to do everything his sisteR did.

Would be much more interested in a follow-up study that compared "lots of baby-talk", "lots of normal talk", and a "do what feels normal" control group.

While it's completely anecdotal, all our friends/family that did the excessive baby-talk to their kids ended up with kids who babbled a lot, but for a lot longer (hard to understand them at age 2/3/4), while those of us who talked to their babies like regular people had babies who babbled less, but used more complete, easier-to-understand sentences sooner.

(Yeah, yeah, confirmation bias, small sample size, not a real study, blah blah. Hence the desire for a proper study.)

Edit: I also wonder how the amount of book reading you do plays into this, as it forces you to speak normally and to enunciate your words so they understand what you're saying. Even if you do an excess of "baby-talk" during the day, if you read to them for an hour at night, it balances out.

I mean this sounds wierd. Could it also be that one set of parents(those who were getting feedback), just wound up talking to their children more?

Our level of 'Parentese' was very small. We talked to both our children for the most part as if they were 'Adults'.

And both our children speak very well, and except for one of our kids medical issues, they both do fine interacting with both adults and other children.

Or maybe im confusing 'Parentese' with baby talk?

I read this the same way. We always spoke clearly and slowly with our young children, but didn't "googoo gaagaa" with them. We used real words and sentence structure. They both speak very well and fluently, with very few vocabulary gaps.

I'm hoping the research isn't promoting ACTUAL baby talk, but just more "talking" with your baby.

Wife, and I both talked a lot to daughter since birth. Sure I got both awws and side-eyes at the grocery store while asking a newborn if she wanted penne or rigitoni, but her language and reading skills are both above average, confirmed by teachers.

Now whether that would have been the case anyway is the tougher question of course.

They were also given suggestions about what kinds of age-appropriate interactions they could have during activities like bathtime or meals.

"Don't talk about illegal activities quite so much. Try to discuss topics other than ****ing *****s on *****s in *****s."

I suppose the uptake is less about language and more about social interactions. By secondary school, pretty much everyone reaches an acceptable level of language skill, regardless of how many Baby Einstein or Baby Mussolini cassettes you listened to as a tyke.

Building a healthy parent-child relationship and helping train their wee minds on social cues (Now you speak. Now I speak. Now you throw up.) sounds like the really important bit.

However, whilst the subhead thingie says "Pretend conversations early on lead to better vocabularies later," the study doesn't seem to have gone on long enough for that.

It may be anecdotal, but my experience with my kids vary a lot from these. We rarely did this with them, talking with them about everything (that would be fit for their ages) like they were adults (often addressing things by their real names and not made up ones) and both have learned to talk early and have a larger vocabulary one would expect from their ages.

I read a different article about this (don't recall where) that makes a strong differentiation between parentese and "baby-talk". Parentese is speaking to your kids fairly normally, but with exaggerated tone. You speak to them conversationally as though they're conversing with you.

Baby-talk is speaking in gibberish/nonsense, which was pointed out as not helpful.

This is the kind of research that while not very flashy can pay humongous dividends in the real world. If something this simple could improve an infants language abilities by even a fairly small percentage reliably, it could have massive consequences for the lives of those infants. They could end up socializing better when they meet other children, doing better and having higher self-esteem in school, and language skills can have knock-on effects on every other aspect of your life. Those would be life changing for many children.

I think we’re seeing another effect given the dropout rates and the type of intentional focus given the parents and subsequently the babies: deliberate practice.

Parents more likely to engage in deliberate practice will see more gains, and also means their kinds will also both engage in deliberate practice as well as see gains from it.

So the question is if we have a control group taught parentese and an experimental group taught parentese and deliberate practice, will we see more gains?

I'm sure there is a potential for both kinds of effects, and I see no reason why they wouldn't be additive. The effect they are talking about makes total sense, and is known to be tied intimately to language acquisition. As someone who learned a new language as an adult, I discovered intimately the fact that going very slowly and being very clear right at the beginning is extremely important, which is what parentese is about. The idea is that you don't even know the categories, what are the phonemes and where the boundaries between them and between words. It takes quite a while for your brain to pick up on all the subtleties, so by starting with simplified and slow and clear equivalents, your brain can correctly notice the right categories quickly, and then as skill and speed build up incrementally, you quickly adapt to more and more subtle distinctions until quickly you can go full speed. If you have to have fine discrimination before you can even categorize, it slows progress.

This has been shown to be very helpful for dyslexics as well, and I have found it invaluable for getting a correct accent, in a language with a lot of very different phonemes than english. There is a lot more you hear when things are exaggerated, and your low level brain circuits kick in to discover the new phonemes, when it is very slow. Too fast, and it just washes over you in a blur. The blur still can eventually help you subconsciously detect the boundaries between words, but it's hard to pick up on fine pronunciation distinctions. English speakers rarely have a good accent in the language I'm learning, but I've been complimented a lot, and I believe the reason is that I spent a lot of time right at the beginning listening closely to pronunciation on slowed-down recordings.

I mean this sounds wierd. Could it also be that one set of parents(those who were getting feedback), just wound up talking to their children more?

Our level of 'Parentese' was very small. We talked to both our children for the most part as if they were 'Adults'.

And both our children speak very well, and except for one of our kids medical issues, they both do fine interacting with both adults and other children.

Or maybe im confusing 'Parentese' with baby talk?

Same or similar here. We never did baby talk with any of our kids, only using our adult voices. But we did teach them some sign language for things like poop, pee, more, food, diaper, etc... All three were fairly language-advanced throughout their time in daycare and continue to be at ages 5, 8 and 16.

Of course, there are probably other variables at work. Kids are sponges. Probably explains why even my 5 year old loves herself some Nine Inch Nails.

They definitely are sponges. My daughter was a.bit behind on talking, she was great at body language and we knew what she needed so that might be why she was slower. The last few months she's really caught up and is at a level a 2 year old should be.

But proud dad moment from last night. My wife says jingle bells, and emmie says smells. I say a few lyrics and she says up up up.

Yes, she was talking about the Joker from Batman the animated series when he busts out of Arkham. She hasn't watch it in like two months.

Some.of this just comes out of no where. And she likes some Slipknot so winning there too.

a. It's cuteb. The reporter/reporting is greatc. The reporter is an infantd. The juxtaposition of cuteness and calling the reporter an infant is hilarious in itself.e. All of the above.f. a, b, and d of the above.g. The backhanded compliment of saying the reporter is great while calling her an infant.

a. It's cuteb. The reporter/reporting is greatc. The reporter is an infantd. The juxtaposition of cuteness and calling the reporter an infant is hilarious in itself.e. All of the above.f. a, b, and d of the above.g. The backhanded compliment of saying the reporter is great while calling her an infant.

Pointing out the obvious, the test isn't double blind. What would have been better would be to Alexa er I mean spy on the parents, then categorize them regarding their baby talking. The comments posted here show there are baby talking parents and those that don't, so you already have your test groups.

one crucial question for future research to answer is whether these benefits persist later into the children’s lives—even after the coaching stops.

Yes, it seems to me that this study is just a tiny piece in a larger puzzle, and parents should not go changing their approach on the basis until it's known what all this really means.

I was interested to see so many other comments already, from parents with essentially the same practices and experience as I and my spouse have, which is that we never used "baby talk" with our children at all. Our observations, comparing the development of our children with those of our friends, are that our children started speaking somewhat later (they all became "verbal" right at 24-25 months, while some other children were earlier, and one was talking at 12 months), but once they started talking, they spoke clearly (intelligibly) and in full sentences, pretty much right away.

(As an aside, they also seemed to develop physical/motor skills more quickly than other children their age. One of our take-aways from that was that an infant, however impressive a learner they are, still has a finite amount of learning they can do in a fixed amount of time, and so different skills will naturally develop at different rates in different children. It seemed that the net amount of learning was much more similar across different children we knew, even if there was a wide disparity in what it was they were learning.)

One of the biggest reasons for us not using baby talk, other than the fact that we just weren't "into it", is that we knew far too many people with children nearing 10 years of age (and now, nearing 20 years of age) who still had speech patterns following "baby talk" patterns, making it very hard to understand them (sort of exaggerated "Elmer Fudd" type speech in many cases). We're well aware that anecdotes and individual experiences don't prove anything, but our impression was that the baby talk was setting early patterns that were difficult or impossible to unlearn, and we didn't want to do that to our own children.

Our children range in age from 11 to 16, and they are by all accounts at least fully competent in their language skills, if not well above average. They are often perceived as older and more mature than they actually are, and I ascribe at least some of this to their command of language. As near as I can tell, at worst, failing to use baby talk when they were infants delayed their initial ability to speak, and has had no ill effects on their long-term language skills, and may even have helped them develop strong language skills overall as compared to their peers.

Wife, and I both talked a lot to daughter since birth. Sure I got both awws and side-eyes at the grocery store while asking a newborn if she wanted penne or rigitoni, but her language and reading skills are both above average, confirmed by teachers.

Now whether that would have been the case anyway is the tougher question of course.

Same here. Our kids (ages 2 and 3) can identify dozens of different animals and know the difference between a leopard and a cheetah (geese, ducks, and swans are still confusing, though) on request, and can name almost as many when pointed to. They know the more prevalent local bird types, and they know most of the foods we serve them by name.

Family attributes it to genes: "Smart parents make smart kids." But we've taken great pains to introduce variety and to not talk down to them, instead simplifying where necessary and (maybe not so) gradually broadening the vocabulary. The older one has had an advanced vocabulary according to daycare since he was just over age 2, and the younger one is catching up fast now that he has ear tubes.

A lot of this is absolutely the privilege we enjoy: nice neighborhood, great daycare, time from mom and dad to spend with books or just pointing out things outside (they also watch more TV than they probably should, like most kids, so we're not paragons of perfect parenting). Part of it is also constantly taking the opportunity to describe things, even at home, so they can build context. There's an incredible, innate ability to learn at that age that is so critical to take advantage of, and which is an investment in the future.

...I suppose the uptake is less about language and more about social interactions. By secondary school, pretty much everyone reaches an acceptable level of language skill, regardless of how many Baby Einstein or Baby Mussolini cassettes you listened to as a tyke.

Building a healthy parent-child relationship and helping train their wee minds on social cues (Now you speak. Now I speak. Now you throw up.) sounds like the really important bit.

Talking to the child more and reading to the child more provides exposure to a larger vocabulary. Talking conversationally with the child has the added bonus of teaching them that they are worth paying attention too.

I would also be curious to see this sort of study expanded to include measuring time spent speaking to the child while they are still in the womb. My wife doted considerably on a co-worker and her baby during the woman's pregnancy and from the first time they "met" the baby lights up as soon as she hears my wife's voice....a response that irks some of the other co-workers to no end.

a. It's cuteb. The reporter/reporting is greatc. The reporter is an infantd. The juxtaposition of cuteness and calling the reporter an infant is hilarious in itself.e. All of the above.f. a, b, and d of the above.g. The backhanded compliment of saying the reporter is great while calling her an infant.

Cathleen's work is always great and interesting but it was iRSS's rephrasing Cathleen's sentence applied to the article.

Cannot read any parentese without hearing Terry Jones and Michael Palin in Monty Python's Mrs Niggerbaiter Explodes sketch that was confirmed by this study.

We, like so many other commentators to this article, did not talk baby-talk to three children. We did talk to them a lot while using easier to understand words said as clearly as we could. We also took the time to call to their attention certain other every day items that was around them. One of theses every day items was the traffic light as we drove places. It was not surprising that the first word spoken was light. In addition to talking to the children in easy understood language we always read to them. During most of the children's early life we also did not have a TV to babysat. That required us the parents to do the babysitting and with that we also had more time to talk and interact with the children. So with the talking, reading and other interacting with the children when they took their ACT test they did much above average in the language field. My conclusion as to the reason that they did so much better than average is of our talking in an easy adult language, reading to them and then encouraging them read widely on their own.